times comes to send you on your way
by theseerasures
Summary: "Alexandra Udinov, citizen of the world," Nikita says, when they finally let go; her eyes might be a little wet, but just because Alex isn't a spy anymore—not officially—doesn't mean she forgets how to keep a secret. "What are you going to do with all that free time?" post-Season 2 AU: Alex leaves the spy life.


"Be sure," Nikita is saying as she hands Alex a cardigan, "I'm not gonna tell you not to go, because if any one of us deserves to get out of this business and have a normal life, it's you. But be _sure_, Alex. There are still people out there who stand to gain from your untimely death, and now that you've become a public figure—just. Be sure."

Alex throws her father's watch and the last of her clothes into her suitcase before picking up the courage to look Nikita in the eye. "I am sure," she says, and her voice is steadier than she thought it would be. "You, and Michael and Ryan and Birkhoff—if anyone can change Division, it's you guys, but…this isn't what I signed up for."

_I'm not even sure _what _I signed up for anymore_, she doesn't say, but what she does say is good enough for Nikita, who wraps her up in a hug. "You know you're welcome anytime. Not—this hellhole, obviously, but…well, you know my safe houses. I'm just a call away."

_You can stay here. This is a safe place_.

"I know," Alex says, "I am too, so—any time you need someone bailed out of jail, or if something big happens and you need some help…"

"Don't tempt me," Nikita mumbles into her shoulder, and they both laugh. "Alexandra Udinov, citizen of the world," Nikita says, when they finally let go; her eyes might be a little wet, but just because Alex isn't a spy anymore—not officially—doesn't mean she forgets how to keep a secret. "What are you going to do with all that free time?"

_I want to learn what it's like to wake up in the morning and not feel sad_. "Oh, I don't know," she says out loud, "I was thinking I might go to college."

It's a start.

* * *

That's not the end of it, of course; next there's a secret goodbye party that Sonya and Nikita threw together at the last minute.

"I think you'll do really well," Ryan says, with an earnestness that only he can carry. It makes her wonder, just for a second, if that's something she should learn from him, to be a normal person. But that's a stupid thing to think—Ryan's a spy, just like the rest of them, and it's not like normal people lie any less.

(_Just look at Mama_, some deep, unfair part of her thinks, but Alex pushes that away.)

Michael is standing in a corner, scowling at anyone who walks by, but smiles and gives Alex a dumb looking wave whenever she looks over in his direction—a wave that probably means he's sending at least half a dozen agents to tail her on her first day out.

Sean is not there. She tries not to think about it.

Birkhoff is surprisingly solemn when he finally says his goodbyes. "Here," he says, a little rough as he pushes a manila envelope into her hands. "I know you're going straight or whatever, but… in case of emergency, right?"

Alex doesn't open it until her first day at Fordham—not until she's unpacked and repacked and unpacked again everything in her suitcase and it _still_ feels rushed, like she's not so sure after all.

Then she sits gingerly on her dorm bed, trying _not_ to think about her old recruit quarters in Division and opens Birkhoff's envelope—to remind herself of why she left or to have some proof that she can still go back, she's not sure.

Inside is a careful pile of falsified documents: birth certificate, passport, license. On each of them the clear black lettering of her new name, if she wants it: _Alexandra Romanova_.

She holds the envelope to her chest and laughs, laughs until tears roll down her cheeks.

* * *

The first month goes about as well as she can expect; she sits in on about fifteen different classes the first week, decides to drop everything except Russian Literature and Underwater Basket-Weaving, picks up seven more, and only drops two because Birkhoff stages an intervention by hacking every electronic surface she owns.

"You're in New York City," he says over her increasingly creative suggestions on what she can do to him with a spork, "Live it up!"

Her roommate Bethany is from Iowa and handles the whole "But you're Alexandra _Udinov_—like, the famous one!" pretty well after the initial outburst; they get along—not instant best friends or anything, but that suits Alex just fine.

With Bethany comes her boyfriend Thomas, and that's…that's a little harder, because Thomas is around _all the time_ and Bethany starts hanging a sock on their doorknob and Alex might be new at this normal, college thing but she's not stupid, she knows what that means and part of her wants to maybe have a discussion with Bethany, go over what they put and didn't put on their roommate contract, but the other part of her, the part that wins—

Well. Alex doesn't want to cause trouble, that's all.

She takes to wandering around the streets of Manhattan at night, not really "living it up" like Birkhoff suggested but just absorbing the people around her, watching the bright lights, listening to the music…all that tourist stuff. (She takes her gun and a knife with her on those sojourns, though, because again: not stupid.)

One night she comes back and hears the dull _smack_ of a fist hitting flesh and a thin, pained noise, and—

Thing is: speedballs or not, Alex _remembers_ most of her time in the brothel—in patchy flashes of clarity sometimes, but still—she remembers Vlad throwing her at any man who would pay enough, and when a man was not careful—well, there were other girls.

Alex remembers gasping the way Bethany just did, trying to mask pain with false arousal, and she should have known, she should have seen—

She draws her gun and _means_ to kick down the door, throw Thomas against the wall and rip him in half, but instead she's running in the opposite direction.

* * *

"You're positive you don't want me to come over?" Nikita asks her, once Alex has calmed down enough to call her.

Nikita's voice echoes a little and if Alex closes her eyes she can easily imagine her sensei making her way down some harshly lit hallway, Michael at her heels. It doesn't take a lot to imagine herself down there, too, on Nikita's other side, getting ready for a mission, saving the world.

"Yeah," she replies, "Yeah, I just…I need to figure this out."

_Alone_, she doesn't say, but Nikita gets it. "You will," she tells Alex. "I don't know much about how this is handled in…schools, but they must have people for this, right? You can talk to them, and then go from there."

"You would have gone in there," Alex says, and it comes out much more like an accusation than she intended. "You would have gone in there and broken his neck."

Nikita is silent for a long time. "I would have," she says finally. "But you're not me, Alex. You never have been."

* * *

That night on a saggy couch in the library, Alex dreams of Thom—or, she dreams about the slowly spreading stain on his pristine, starched shirt, the way a light burst into his eyes before it faded again.

That's the way it is, isn't it? She's killed people. Even if most of them had been accidents to save her own life, it still makes her a murderer.

She jerks awake sometime around dawn, blindly grasping for her gun. It slots too neatly into her hand, too traced over with memories, and there's something sticky caught in the safety, no matter how many times she cleans it.

* * *

Thomas has left by the time she goes back to her room after Friday classes and so Alex pretends nothing happened and then pretends nothing happened some more—just waits and makes note of the times when Bethany has a new bruise or walks with a limp, or holds herself a little gingerly.

And she tries to convince herself, in the meantime, that this isn't somehow _cheating_, that this isn't just the same as when she ran away and left Irina and the girls behind.

(She's not _running away,_ this time. She's not doing anything else, either, and that's the part that's the hardest to swallow, Alex thinks—just to be still.)

"It sounds safer," her mother says to her over the phone, after Alex gives her a quick and highly abridged rundown of her life in an American university. "Than what you were doing."

Alex laughs, a little shakily. "It is that."

"Chios is beautiful right now," her mother tells her, voice almost swallowed by what Alex thinks is probably a wave coming in. "I wish you'd come here, _babochka_—I know what you said, about needing time, but—"

"I know," Alex says, and she can see a shadow _there_, too: Alexandra Udinov sitting in her mother's cabin, looking at a beautiful sunset. The thing is, though—she can see other shadows there, bigger ones: Sergei Semak's. Nikolai Udinov, benign but strangely monstrous, a hand planted firmly on the small of Alex's back.

She's spent five years being cut open because of her family, the next two letting the wounds scab over before picking everything apart again.

There's a small hiss over the phone as Mama sighs. "When you are ready," she says, and Alex lets herself think _maybe_.

"When I'm ready," she echoes.

* * *

Bethany hobbles home one night with a black eye, and something just goes _click_ in the back of Alex's head, a voice that sounds nothing like her father saying _now, Alexandra, now_

She brings the stuff she has against Thomas to her RA, who brings it to the Hall Director, who brings it to Dean Caldwell, who barely looks at the evidence before fixing Alex with a glare. "You should know that we take accusations like this _very_ seriously."

"Good," Alex says, before the word _accusation_ registers in her head. "What?"

Dean Caldwell makes a weird tutting noise from the back of her throat before firing off a round of questions: Can anyone else verify Bethany's injuries? Is she sure about the dates the injuries occurred? Has she actually _seen_ any abuse occur?

"Why would I lie about this?" Alex demands, after she's finished answering the questions.

"Another spotlight on the nightly news?" Caldwell suggests, like—like it's _nothing_, and it feels worse than every other interrogation Alex has ever been through.

"Are you fucking kidding me? Do you know—" her voice cracks and she hates, _hates_ herself for it. "Do you know what I've _lived through?_"

"It looks pretty thorough," her hall director is saying as he hovers anxiously over them, "You must have been sitting on this for…what, a month?"

Her throat closes up. "I—" _wanted to be sure_, she wants to say, but there's no way to say that that doesn't make her just…_awful_.

(And maybe she is, for waiting this long. For waiting at all.)

Caldwell makes a sound again, like this is something inconvenient she found on the bottom of her shoe. "There will be an investigation."

* * *

When she finally is brave enough to go back to their room, Bethany's gone—no clothes, no furniture, no trace that Alex has ever had a roommate at all.

Just gone.

* * *

When Michael knocks, she's sitting on the floor, holding the most expensive bottle of vodka she could find in a death grip. "I didn't drink any," she mumbles as he swoops her up into a firm hug.

"I know," he says. "Nikita's going to meet us in Central Park. Wanna go for a ride?"

Wherever Nikita is must not be _in the city_, because by the time she gets there it's almost midnight, and Alex is pouring the entire contents of the vodka bottle into an open flame.

"Is that allowed?" Nikita asks, flinging an arm around Alex's shoulders.

"Michael let me," Alex says, watching the flames grow and die down. "Probably told the cops it was some secret agent thing."

Nikita lets out a dry chuckle. "Probably. Alex…"

"I'm fine," Alex says, before she can stop herself. "Well, not…I never thought it'd turn out perfect, I just…"

The arm around her shoulders tightens a little, but Nikita is silent, just watches her.

"I'm going back," Alex says, after a while. "School, I mean. It was nice for Birkhoff to sign me up as a Communications major, but I think…I think I'm changing to Human Rights. I'm going to graduate, and then…and then law school. I want to make a change and—I _can_, right? Not like most people. It's not like I can ever spend the money I have in one lifetime, might as well throw it at something useful."

On impulse, she grabs Nikita's free hand and squeezes. Nikita squeezes back, and smiles. "Okay."

Alex laughs. "Okay?"

"Okay," Nikita says again, "Now. Tell me about your classes?"

* * *

Semester next: she formally switches her major, only takes six classes at Birkhoff's behest, and gets a new roommate.

"Nice to meet you," she says, taking the offered hand. "I'm—"

"Alexandra Udinov," Sharon-from-DC says. "Everybody knows who you are."

"Funny thing, so do I," Alex says, feeling the corners of her mouth quirk up.

It feels less and less like a lie every day.


End file.
